This book explores software's pivotal role as the code that powers computers, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. Creating conditions for the ongoing development and use of software, including the Internet as a communications infrastructure, is one of the most compelling issues of our time. Free software is based upon open source code, developed in peer communities as well as corporate settings. It challenges the dominance of proprietary software firms like Microsoft and Apple. Free software promotes the digital commons where users are free to access, share, remix, sell and redistribute software and the myriad cultural products it is used to create. Consumers may thus become producers of cultural content, such as videos, music and more. Drawing upon key cases and interviews with free software proponents based in Europe, Brazil and the U.S., the book explores three pathways toward creating the digital commons. First, the initial foundations for the digital commons were laid in the 1980s, as advocates in the U.S. and Brazil created free software as a new form of property and opened up access to the emerging Internet. Second, free software can be produced in both peer communities and market-based firms. The software market itself thus provides opportunities to develop the commons. Third, free software communities employ a range of strategies to ensure community control over the ongoing creation of the software. Peer producers organize themselves to resist what they view as threats by corporations to undermine the open source, community-based nature of the software. Free software and net neutrality advocates forge global communities of resistance, uniting diverse local participants in global projects. They promote the freedom to share and collaborate, as well as respect for sovereignty and civil liberties like the rights to free speech and privacy.

“Shifting Strategies of Sovereignty: Brazil and the Politics of Globalization” Pp. 301-331 in Philip McMichael and Fred Buttel, eds., New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development. Elsevier, 2005.